Review by Steve Bennett

You know you’re in for a long hour when you look at your watch a few minutes into a show. You know it’s going to be even longer when the performer does it.

Everything about Pauline Curtin’s attitude suggests a woman who doesn’t want to be here. And not just on the stage, she exudes a misery that she would rather be anywhere else than on this planet, and it’s not long before the audience agree.

The bitterness isn’t the sort of sharp, focussed passion that has fueled so much great angry comedy, but just a depressing pallor. She’s not a natural comic in delivery, energy, or in her limp writing; rather an unfocussed whiner, down about everything: the rich, the poor, the fat, the thin, Europeans, men, the Catholic Church, and her ex-husband.

‘Poor and fat? That’s a bit council estate,’ she sneers through pinched lips. ‘They could have a chip on their shoulder... but no, the chips are all on their plate.’

She clearly thinks that chip line is such a zinger she uses it again later, in a dreadful poem.

Yet for all her own shortcomings, she’s resentful about her peers, admitting finding schadenfreude in zero-star reviews for those she thinks are only lauded because they are young, good-looking or smiley. Equally she thinks she would have a better career if she had the angle of being a lesbian ‘I could suck a rug to get on the red carpet,’ she says charmlessly.

The fact she might need good material seems to have escaped her. Instead, she offers nothing but half-formed jokes about the cabbage diet making you fart, about vomiting bulimiacs, and about social media ‘or Fightbook and Twatter as I like to call them’. This is the level of her wit. Here’s another ‘joke’: Why does the black widow eat her mate after sex? To stop the snoring before it begins!’

Curtin is one of those acts who would be touch-and-go on a new act night; embarking on a very long hour when she’s nothing to express but her unhappiness seems almost sadistic. Yet shockingly, this is the second full show following her poorly-reviewed Edinburgh debut last year.

Curtin’s set tonight is mostly greeted with silence, save for her constantly namechecked friend in the back row. One brave couple did make a break for the door, and as they left she repeated their mumbled, embarrassed apologies in a snide voice of mockery, while they were still in earshot, which just about sums up her ungracious nature. A poor show all round.

Review date: 22 May 2013
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Brighton The Quadrant